Thanks Snowfire!
Gunpoint: I'm really late here, but Gunpoint is great. It's some 2D infiltration game in which you have super boosts for super jumps but also can hack everything. So you can link a guard's gun to a light switch; if you press the switch, the guard's gun will go off. It is cool. There are many interesting ways to approach the game, plus upgrades, etc etc.
The storyline is neo-noir cyberpunk and goes into highly unexpected and amusing directions. During like half the missions, I was actively working against my contractors in secret? And they aren't even bad people, I was just covering my tracks.
I love the sense of humour shown in the achievements:
- There's an achievement for kicking a door, one for kicking a door into a guard, and another for kicking a door into a window called "Might as well have an achievement for that too" In game, you get the three of them in quick succession.
- If you're bad at this game you're going to make an elaborate hacking process that is going to lead into you getting knocked out by a door. This happened to me and I got an achievement for it.
- There's "Title Finally Relevant" with the description: "Help justify my early, not entirely wise choice of game name by holding someone at gunpoint with the Resolver" In practice you just don't really use the gun.
- There's "Acknowledged Ludonarrative Dissonance" for acknowledging that you've killed far more people than you've avenged at the very end.
- I can't tell much about it, but there's one achievement for almost telling the truth but chickening out at the last minute, and I burst out laughing.
It is also 3 hours long, which is no longer a problem for me.
Invisible Inc: Another insanely stylish neo-noir cyberpunk games. The animated character portraits are gorgeous, and I can't understand why nobody has made animated gifs yet. Look at any gameplay video and watch those portraits on the lower left side of the screen. Jesus.
This seems like a perfection of the X-Com model so far. All my complaints about X-Com are gone and I feel like I really could lose myself in this.
The game has a stealthier approach: There are no HP bars and you are meant to sneak around by using cover and incapaciting enemies. You can also kill enemies, but killing has huge drawbacks. Stealth is easy because there's a peek button, you see enemy "vision cones", and can move one step at a time instead of having to move all the way all the time.
Finishing the one objective and escaping is usually easy enough, but there are a lot of side objectives that lead to $$$. On the other hand, the alarm level is constantly raising and you do not want to waste any time. What do you do? There are a lot of agonizing choices to make, and the game is very good at punishing greed. There is no RNG and there's no need to.
Campaigns are shorter but the game is meant to be replayed a lot. You get stuff for finishing or losing the game, unlocking new characters and things. In fact in your first playthrough you only have two characters out of four and you're supposed to play on easy.
Bloodborne: I finished the DLC, got all the bosses on the first try except Laurence. 50 Vit / 50 Str build, lol.
Bloodborne gets to be the first game in which the Fishing Hamlet is not the first or second place you see in the game, a peaceful village with peaceful NPCs, but the last place with the hardest monsters.
The bosses are cool, the level design is cool, everything is cool. My one complaint is that all these new weapons could have fixed my problem with Bloodborne (a lack of weapons), but in practice they're fairly difficult to get because they're all in the postgame difficulty DLC. I'd have liked it better if they had put them early on in the rest of the regular game instead.
